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A Spectator sport

a con, Ed Balls, Fraser Nelson, George Osborne, Labour, political chicanery, political guerilla warfare, politics, Spectator No Responses »

Jul 052012

There seems to be a bit of a palaver going on at the Spectator at the moment. Yesterday, this content was launched upon the web, making the following accusations about Ed Balls MP.

George Osborne has now let it be known that he withdraws any allegations it is alleged he has made. I do wonder, however, if any legal proceedings were to take place as a result, who might be alleged to have fallen foul of the truth. It’s true that Osborne himself only alludes to the possibility that Balls might have had something to do with the scandal. As any clever politician would, he chooses his words with great care.

And if you read very carefully, the only clear reference to any accusations as such resides in a very weasel-like phrase which – allegedly – must have come from either the Spectator‘s own author, sub-editing or style team. The phrase in question runs as follows:

One wonders if it is also intended to bring into question Balls’s defence that he couldn’t have known about any rate-fixing as he was Secretary of State for Children at the time.

I say weasel-like simply because of the use of the word “one”. Who, exactly, does “one” mean? Osborne; the collective intelligence of the Tory Party; the writer of the article; or simply a vacuous humanity? And if so, how on earth are you going to take such a humanity to court?

It’s nasty stuff, isn’t it? People around Brown; discussing reports; the regulatory system devised by Brown and Balls (without mentioning the fact that – at the time – the Tories were pushing for more deregulation rather than less) … almost, in fact, as if both Osborne and the author of the article are deliberately throwing out political coals for the rest of us to foolishly attempt to leap across.

Nick Robinson, not my favourite journalist, tweeted this evening this choice phrase:

George O will be delighted if row about Labour’s handling of the banks in office trumps argument about whether to hold a public inquiry.

Politics really is a disgusting business. A spectator sport for the vast majority of those affected.

And as another bank – this time RBS – is also apparently on the point of being fined hundreds of millions of pounds for fixing Libor rates (more here), the Osbornes of this world can only continue to delightedly dance on our encroaching graves.

Prejudice vs values – so was Labour a party of mumbo jumbo?

Labour, New Labour, political beliefs, political parties, politicians, politics, prejudice, Tony Blair, triangulation, tribalism, two-party system, two-tier society, unclassifiable, values No Responses »

Jun 272012

Bob Diamond, the top boss at Barclays, has this to say on the circumstances that led to a £290 million fine being slapped on the bank for apparently manipulating – in contravention of its own rules and to its own benefit – interbank interest rates over a sustained period of time (the bold is mine):

“The events which gave rise to today’s resolutions relate to past actions which fell well short of the standards to which Barclays aspires in the conduct of its business. When we identified those issues, we took prompt action to fix them and co-operated extensively and proactively with the authorities,” Diamond said.

“Nothing is more important to me than having a strong culture at Barclays; I am sorry that some people acted in a manner not consistent with our culture and values.”

The Guardian report which lays out these pretty repulsive facts starts out by telling us (again, the bold is mine):

The £59.5m fine from the Financial Services Authority is the largest penalty ever levied by the City regulator, which found that Barclays contravened its rules for a number of years and involved “a significant number of employees”.

Both these passages lead me to wonder if my previous piece on prejudice in politics isn’t being replicated in other areas of life. And perhaps when I said “prejudice”, I should have really said “values”. And when I say values, perhaps I should make the distinction between overt and covert values. For when Mr Diamond says “Nothing is more important to me than having a strong culture at Barclays [...]” and we learn that what happened took place over “a number of years and involved a ‘significant number of employees’”, what then do we have if not an organisation with two separate sets of cultures? The overt one, the one supposedly promoted by HR and communications departments various, the one – in fact – which Mr Diamond argues did not prevail; and the covert one, the one many people operated under for many years, the one which concentrated great wealth in the already deep pockets of its shareholders and managerial class – and which, presumably, went undetected by absolutely everyone at the top.

And so it is that I am minded to come back to politics. When politicians, think tanks, supporters and tacticians all slaver on about the importance of values in political action, are they actually following the same line Barclays Bank apparently followed? Overt values for the working classes and covert values for those who wish to get to power on the back of the former’s votes.

And if such a circumstance wasn’t sufficiently bad in itself, when they talk about values as if they were an intellectual breath of fresh air – and when they refuse to recognise the existence of any equivalent cousins of a covert nature – are they actually talking not about a distinct concept of political weight but, rather, about rank-and-file prejudices very similar to the most primitive which any of us out here are inclined to hold?

Just dressed up in fancy language …

In short, are political values nothing more nor less than tiresomely cobbled-together belief systems – as lacking in scientific rigour or, indeed, any basis in real and useful evidence as any mumbo jumbo we might be required to stumble across?

And if so, what does that mean for our most beloved political parties? Mine, for example – which, in Tony Blair’s massive reign, was rebuilt through the clever sleight-of-hand that was this game of remaining true to our values – even as we arguably changed our political colours.

All of which leads to me to want to add one final thought, before we shut up shop for tonight: if Labour has been a party of mumbo jumbo, it’s not the only political party which has played what is clearly a long-standing game of overt values versus covert values; nor the only one which has been selling the idea that values are far more resilient and acceptable than prejudices.

They are all, in fact, I would suggest, to a greater or lesser degree, tempted by this euphemism that the word “values” has become ; and, just as similarly, tempted to create a two-tier relationship – as per the Barclays example we started out with today – between the values they aspire to in public and the values they practise when at work behind the scenes.

Business and politics were never so mirroring as today. When it could be so good, it turns out so foul.

What have we done to our societies?

Really, what have we allowed to take place under our stupid noses?

What if prejudice quite correctly is the stuff of politics?

conversational politics, evidence-based blogging, evidence-based professionals, in a hole, political innovation, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics, prejudice No Responses »

Jun 272012

Chris concludes his post today in the following damning and depressing way:

[...] Miliband says, correctly, that Labour became “disconnected from the concerns of working people.” This is not just a political problem but an individual one for those of use who jumped through the Govean hoops of “rigour”: we become socially isolated, geeks, weirdos and nerds. Academic success has big drawbacks.

It could, then, be that the costs of rigour outweigh the benefits.

If I understand the implications correctly of his conclusion, academia and politics simply don’t mix. Academia is for a world where evidence is valued. But the problem politics has with such an approach – quite at the margin of whether we should trust our current leaders and give them the benefit of the doubt in what they do – is that most ordinary people don’t seem to value evidence at all. In much the same way, in fact, as most political actors in charge – who don’t seem to either these days.

I’ve recently had occasion to criticise politicians for being medieval (more on the greasy-pole theorem here), but Chris’s piece today makes me wonder if I’m being unfair. What if politicians are right to use prejudice to move the mountains of voters? What if nations cannot be usefully moved in any other way? What if we are condemned to a society and civilisation where “the concerns of working people” unhappily equal attitudes constructed on the sands of prejudice instead of solid opinions based on the realities of careful study?

If – as members of political movements, as promoters of evidence-based social and mainstream media and as thoughtful people in general – we are foolishly swimming against an ultimately unstoppable tide, perhaps it is time we admitted that voters are on the whole not scientists, researchers nor PhD students – and prejudice-based politicians who intuitively press our buttons know far more about the business of politics than we, in our white plastic towers of iPads and connected gadgets various, will ever know.

It’s a saddening thought though, isn’t it? A saddening thought.

____________________

Further reading: a couple of websites which have come my way recently and which attempt to inject evidence and objective information into the hackneyed debates of politics. First, Political Innovation‘s new project Who Funds You?: a sharp attempt to make absolutely clear which political and business ideologues are funding which allegedly – and in some cases superficially – even-handed think tanks. Second, a new blog from Andrew which looks at how an overarching superstructure of attitudes, behaviours and hows might inform any British government, whatever the political inclination.

The Greasy-Pole Theorem (or more on professionalising politics)

doctors, education, evidence-based professionals, laws, lawyers, medicine, medieval mind, politicians, politicking, politics, science, sorted, teachers, teaching, trained lawyers, training 1 Response »

Jun 182012

Yesterday, I suggested that politicians – as opposed to evidence-based professionals like lawyers, doctors, scientists and educators – really were anchored in medieval times:

[...] those times when lords did their lording over serfs who did their kneeling; where people occupied castes which knew their place; and where every attempt at social mobility involved a threat against the integrity of the status quo.

I also concluded that:

Even as doctors, lawyers, scientists and educators have left behind them the dark and dreary miseries of medieval imposition and woodentop thought, politicians continue to believe in top-down hierarchies, in pyramidal politics, in tribal loyalties, in conditional relationships of all kinds … essentially, in the pursuit of a grand largesse where you get ahead only as far as birth allows you to; where you get ahead only as far as money defines is permissible.

Now I realise, in retrospect, that I was perhaps using a rather broad brush when I painted all politicians as medieval throwbacks. So here’s a gentle – and I hope reasonable – qualification of my original thesis: the higher up the greasy pole of power a politician gets, the more medieval his or her behaviours become.

Medieval in the sense I describe above. Or, alternatively, just as constructively, medieval in the sense of a persistent and resilient plague.

So not all by any means. Just those who exert power and count.

Does that sit more nicely?

Of course it doesn’t. And those of you who are practising politicians will resent my casting aspersions on a whole profession – especially in times of terrible crisis. “It doesn’t help one bit!” you will exclaim. “It’s unfair, unjust and totally unhelpful to be describing the vast majority of good professionals in terms of the awful ones at the top.”

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? When we talk of professional classes such as doctors or educators, we’re talking about roles where training periods can be between one and seven or more years. And whilst this training is taking place, performance, attitude and behaviours are all measured and tested so that the individuals under the microscope of improvement understand exactly what is expected of them – before they go out and practise.

Where is the training-ground of politicians? Local government politics perhaps? On the job, most certainly. My experience at parish-councillor level is depressing. Most significant decisions were taken (or not, as the case may be) on firmly partisan lines. No real thought going on there; no careful analysis of what was really needed. Just small people acting out of personal prejudice – and things they’d picked up from the papers.

Multiply this experience up a thousandfold and what happens? The more you get these politicians moving out of their comfort zones, the less they are likely to use data to guide them. Instinct, impulse and hunch rear their ugly heads. Which is when we get the plague of the greasy-pole theorem I mentioned above.

If politicians truly want to be treated on the same level as other professional classes, they must want to show the rest of us they are prepared to be trained, channelled, instructed and measured in the same evidence-based ways as those they would aspire to rule. And they must also show, as lawyers, scientists, educators and the medical profession do most days of the week, that their vocation and goal in life is to be what they train to become.

For far too many voters, there is a perception that political activity is a simple springboard – on the backs of ordinary people’s interests – to better and materially more satisfying things.

What do I suggest, then, we require of our political class before they can begin to enable our societies? A very short list made up of the following two items:

proper and professionally couched training and study as a minimum requirement before any formal political activity which involved representing others can be countenanced; and
a firm and indissoluble promise to never exercise any other profession or activity on the back of one’s political history

Would that do us?

Does that seem reasonable?

What, as a chastened voter, would you think of such changes?

And would you have any other items you’d like to add to the list?

Politicians really are anchored in medieval times, aren’t they?

a con, evidence-based professionals, politicians, politics 2 Responses »

Jun 172012

I’m getting quite cross now with the behaviours of that profession which only exists to enable a better functioning of our lives. Without a better functioning, there is no justification for this profession. The profession I talk about is that of politicians. Our lives are rapidly degrading – and it is my understanding that this is happening because our politicians are not doing the only job that justifies their existence.

What’s more, they are anchored in medieval times – those times when lords did their lording over serfs who did their kneeling; where people occupied castes which knew their place; and where every attempt at social mobility involved a threat against the integrity of the status quo.

Not much has changed, has it? Really, it has not.

Last autumn, I had an opportunity to witness examples of such mindsets. I was invited to a number of presentations for mainstream and social media by the Law Society on the Legal Aid bill which was going through Parliament at the time. I posted quite a bit from my generally limited understanding of the law – it was, at the very least, clear to me that Legal Aid was one of the prime and essential pillars of the post-war Welfare State. Without equal access to legal advice, a society collapses in the moral ruins the unbound powerful leave behind them.

Anyhow, I also had the opportunity to speak to evidence-based professionals involved in the process – lawyers in the main – and one of the things I noticed from the very beginning was their utter belief, their strategic mistake too, that a properly argued and costed case would be sufficient in itself to win the politicians over. What was their case then? Essentially, the Law Society devised a plan of cuts which would have protected the key elements of Legal Aid as well as saving even more money than the government itself was aiming to. The plan seemed such a wonderful double-whammy of an argument they simply couldn’t conceive how the politicians might reject it.

Yet consistently, and without exception, they did. I haven’t been following the most recent developments, so don’t know how it’s ended up – but I suspect the Coalition won’t have abandoned its attempts to reassert the medieval relationship of lord and serf.

There are, of course, plenty of other examples around at the moment: doctors and nurses and the NHS reorganisation; teachers and education change. God only knows there are enough evidence-based professionals in our society for politicians to have a model they could easily follow.

But it’s not happening. Even as doctors, lawyers, scientists and educators have left behind them the dark and dreary miseries of medieval imposition and woodentop thought, politicians continue to believe in top-down hierarchies, in pyramidal politics, in tribal loyalties, in conditional relationships of all kinds … essentially, in the pursuit of a grand largesse where you get ahead only as far as birth allows you to; where you get ahead only as far as money defines is permissible.

Most of the world has moved on since medieval times.

This is why the incomprehension which exists between evidence-based professionals and our prejudiced makers and shakers only accentuates and reveals our understanding of why future degradation will almost certainly be our lot.

Our political class needs to leave medieval times behind it.

Question is, who can convince it of the imperious need?

Who can get through its prejudice-filled skulls?

Who can ensure – in time – that it begins to operate on the basis of fact, data and information?

Not, I would hazard a guess, the evidence-based professionals who, even now it would seem, fail to understand the breadth of the gap in ways of thinking between themselves on the one hand and the rhetorical types on the other.

So if the lawyers, doctors, scientists and educators can’t get through to the politicos, who – really – is left?

Who can save us from a professional class which – as history and civilisation have both moved on – remains in power but, nevertheless, has lost all right to call itself professional?

Are politicians the culprits or the victims of an impossible democracy?

civilisation, democracy, democratic deficit, experts, in a hole, politicians, politics, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations No Responses »

May 242012

Nick Clegg will say this today, apparently:

Greece exiting the euro is something “no rational person” should advocate and would cause “irrevocable damage”, Nick Clegg is expected to say later.

In a speech in Berlin, the deputy prime minister is also likely to criticise European leaders’ “fragmented” response to the eurozone crisis.

He will say the way decisions are taken is undermining public confidence.

Meanwhile, Iain Martin over at the Telegraph berates Clegg thus:

[...] The Deputy Prime Minister is in Berlin to make one of his speeches, this one containing even more guff – or Clegguff, as I think it should be known – than usual. “A dark cloud hangs over Europe,” he says. He claims that anyone who thinks Greece leaving – which would be difficult of course, but is probably better than the alternative – is being “irrational”. Clegg says of the eurocrisis that “the tree is falling” but that we are “pruning it one leaf at a time.” It sounds like a spoof ancient Chinese proverb.

And a tweet which comes my way this morning goes even further:

Nick Clegg says “Greece must stay in the Euro.” He would know, because he’s been a skiing instructor and has a degree in archaeology. Twat.

It’s clear that of all pyramidal organisations which stand or fall as a result of the day-to-day actions of (generally) one single white male at the very top of the pile, politics in representative democracy is the very worst. And I wonder why our democracy appears to have become an impossible democracy: where accuracy of representation is a marketing-message process of massaging our instincts for truth and understanding; where efficiency is an extra, bolted on as afterthought; where expertise is no longer used to illuminate but hide and allow profits and personal incomes to be evilly eked out.

Are politicians, then, the culprits or the victims of an impossibly democracy? Is democracy – where we are told the ordinary citizen has a right to sit at the top table and have a voice – incompatible with an evermore complex society?

Has, in fact, democracy had its day?

As we criticise Mr Clegg for not having the knowhow he’d need to have a right to express an opinion on the eurocrisis, we can surely only be criticising ourselves for daring to express how we feel on a situation we suffer from but have no expert knowledge about.

What’s going to break down in the end is not the tenuous threads of our civilisation – for the large corporations will continue to deliver the electricity, oil, water and consumer durables we so crave; no, what’s going to break down in the end will be our sense of any kind of real democratic empowerment. By telling us off for only having a degree in archaeology, all desires and impulses to participate in democratic discourse can be scythed at one revealing stroke.

These days, you see, we’re experts in iPods – just totally inept at life.

Why we’re in the shit we’re in

a con, Coalition capitalism, David Cameron, economic abuse, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, elitism, politicians, politics No Responses »

May 202012

Apologies for the title. But reading this article from the Wall Street Journal this morning reveals to me with an evermore greater clarity exactly why we’re in the shit we’re in. Some choice thoughts from this excellent piece on the subject of what economists really (don’t) know:

As Greece girds for elections next month that could lead to its exit from the euro zone, economists are acknowledging an unsettling reality: No one knows what the bill will be.

[...]

The Institute of International Finance, a global association of banks that has represented private lenders to Greece in negotiations with the country, took a broader view. In a February report that leaked in March, it put the total cost at a minimum of €1 trillion, including over €700 billion that could be needed to prop up other troubled European economies, including Portugal and Italy.

[...]

“The IIF went for a trillion because, why not?” says Gary Jenkins, founder of Swordfish Research, a U.K. bond-analysis firm. “It’s a great figure, sounds fantastic.” However, Mr. Jenkins adds, “I don’t think anyone can work out a precise figure. The uncertainties are just absolutely huge.”

So whilst Mr Cameron’s government berates us for not putting our household affairs in order, his chummy friends at stratospheric economic levels go for a back-of-the-envelope figure when pricing the cost of things – because it “sounds fantastic”. And in the meantime, such back-of-the-envelope merchants continue to describe the less-advantaged economic powerhouses of the West as PIGS.

Fuck youse.

Question is, who are those “youse”?

Economists will argue that as theoreticians and thinkers, they simply lay before those who take the decisions the options they’ve duly imagined.

On the other hand, those who participated in developing the atom bomb surely had qualms of conscience around the matter – even if they took no part in the final decision to drop it.

So do we blame the economists for creating a self-consuming Darwinian evil of winner takes all? Or do we blame the politicians for eagerly attaching themselves to such theories when the intellectual times we live in could’ve delivered so much more?

Or can we simply rejoice – in a cutting-one’s-nose-off kind of way – that even the experts must now experience the directionless impotence the rest of us are living from day-to-bloody-day?

How the Coalition bullies our teachers into bullying our children

bullying, child abuse, childhood, children, Coalition, education, in a hole, politicians, politics, teachers, teaching 1 Response »

May 162012

We’re a household full of examination stress at the moment. My eldest is at uni, looking to pass his second-year exams in order to be able to visit and stay in China next year. My middle son, meanwhile, is taking his AS-levels – next week he has three exams: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

But where I detect significant distress is in my daughter. She has only just turned fourteen and yet her school has decided for some incredibly bizarre reason to put her whole cohort through the stress of GCSEs. Just remember how you were at such an age: study skills barely developed, if at all; in the middle of adolescent angst, the terror of potential failure and ever-present panic getting ready to strike one down.

Now all credit to her Religious Studies’ teacher (for that is the GCSE which is being sat). He used to be a lawyer and has produced an excellently structured and logical set of revision notes. She truly appreciates his wisdoms and his intelligences – and in the evidenced and logical way that she has finds him quite the best teacher in the school. So it was that this morning, in the face of rising hysteria, he told the cohort not to worry about tomorrow’s exam: it really meant very little and should cause no preoccupation whatsoever.

Good job, my man: sensitive teaching. Ruffled feathers gently soothed. Could question the decision to put forward Year 9s for GCSEs in the first place – but would not question the sensibility with which this teacher has carried out his role.

So there was my daughter – slightly less anxious than before – as the morning progressed to Geography. Can you then guess what happened? The Geography teacher, whose subject was not being examined in any way, proceeded to truly put the fear of God up the cohort all over again. The admonition apparently went something along the following lines: “You really won’t want to fail this exam. The government doesn’t want to see you sitting and resitting exams all the time.”

WTF? I mean, WTF? WTF does my daughter’s taking of GCSEs at the tender age of barely fourteen have to do with the government, for Christ’s sake?

Yes. It’s clear that teachers are being extremely stressed out by the consequences of the government’s stupid cuts and idiotic economic policy. I am, as a person mildly interested in politics. My wife and I are, as parents of the above-mentioned children. But surely the job of such interested parties as ourselves is to strive whenever we can to put a protective firewall between callous government and our charges. Or should we tell it just as it is? As the Coalition government proceeds to punish and bully its subjects, should we transmit the message and process down the line and bully our subjects in turn?

To be honest, I am absolutely fed up of a couple of really bad eggs at my daughter’s school. Bullying of the casual kind that is taking place between teachers and students is utterly unacceptable even as hierarchies continue to accept it.

But the kind of treatment my daughter and her classmates had to suffer today, at the hands of a teacher who (at least today, for whatever reason) was anything but well-meaning, is completely intolerable.

As is the political class which kicks the man who kicks the woman who kicks the kid who kicks the dog which chases the cat which mauls the bird which was once able to eat the worms.

And that’s how the Coalition bullies our teachers into bullying our children.

Only the rest of us must surely manage to do a little better than that.

Social Darwinism vs game theory – where does our politics stand now?

Darwinian capitalism, game theory, gaming, in a hole, politics, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations 1 Response »

May 152012

I just posted on the subject of a complicating world. In the back of my mind was the inability of democracy to keep up with such complexities. So it is that I ask myself: social Darwinism versus game theory – where does our politics stand now?

A couple of definitions to start with, just so we know where we stand. First, social Darwinism:

Social Darwinism is generally understood to use the concepts of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest to justify social policies which make no distinction between those able to support themselves and those unable to support themselves. Many such views stress competition between individuals in laissez-faire capitalism; but the ideology has also motivated ideas of eugenics, scientific racism, imperialism,^[4] fascism, Nazism and struggle between national or racial groups.^[5]^[6]

Second, game theory:

Game theory is the study of strategic decision making. More formally, it is “the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers.”^[1] An alternative term suggested “as a more descriptive name for the discipline” is interactive decision theory.^[2] Game theory is mainly used in economics, political science, and psychology, as well as logic and biology. The subject first addressed zero-sum games, such that one person’s gains exactly equal net losses of the other participant(s). Today, however, game theory applies to a wide range of class relations, and has developed into an umbrella term for the logical side of science, to include both human and non-humans, like computers. [...]

And I did rather assume, for quite a while, that we were the children of the latter: of a game-theory century. But as awful people do awful things to the majority of ordinary citizens round the globe, we forget all those longer-term lessons of such game theories, of finding a natural and constructive equilibrium in the logical hemisphere of human thought; and – instead – we scurry around and pay homage to those up-and-coming political leaders who can, once more, vanquish our evil wrongdoing opposition at a single and mighty stroke of the political sword.

In the end, a terrifying political expediency – not theirs but ours – returns us to the doldrums of social Darwinism and its unhappy latterday cousins. Yes. It’s we who are to blame: they, after all, enter into the Darwin-like dynamics of win or lose with a grand intentionality and coherence. We cannot blame them for the crimes which, through omission or deliberation, we commit: it is our fault that our society is made up of a disagreeable mix of eugenics, scientific racism, imperialism, fascism and Nazism – as well as various kinds of essentially uncivic nationalisms; it is our fault that all of that is there; it is our fault that our civilisations, our politics and our socioeconomic orders are choosing stupid and unthinking pyramidal structures over intelligent and cogent theories of collaborative gaming.

Where does our politics stand then? Well – frankly – where we might fall.

I think I am about as depressed about the future we offer up to our offspring as I have ever been in my life. In the middle of an opportunity to choose brainpower and cooperation over violent impositional power, we are simply choosing to battle the latter with more of the same.

The cycle will never end.

We’re totally and utterly buggered.

Is God – as a hierarchical model – our only workable alternative?

God, politicking, politics, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations, unclassifiable No Responses »

May 092012

I ask this question in the light of the Queen’s Speech today. It seems to me – as I pointed out yesterday – that our government is made up of professional incompetents; and so I then wonder what this might be due to. Is it perhaps that our democracy isn’t the best tool for choosing leaders? Is it that stuffing politics full of business-world wannabes means you get the dross of what might have been – not the promise of the best? (Those who can, do; those who can’t, do politics perhaps …) Is it, even, that our pyramid politics – fashioned as it is on the frameworks and hierarchical structures which latterday big business uses everywhere – is simply inappropriate for a world where grassroots organisation appears to be taking over in so many sectors?

Or is it that the vacuum left behind, in the absence of a more traditional religion (that thought which underpinned Western behaviours for such a long time), has been filled with a foolish and empty-headed political activity where those who act believe that what they do will literally reshape our worlds?

For there was a time in Western society when religion provided the excuse for almost any stupidity. Such behaviours are still visible in parts of the world: even in Europe, for example, where the Breiviks of our supposed civilisation are just the evil and visible tip of a mostly hidden fascist iceberg which alleges our worldly problems are due to an invasion of Islamic fundamentalism.

So religion is a get-out clause many people continue to freely use.

But it doesn’t bind us in quite the same tribal way as it used to.

Politics, on the other hand, does seem to be developing so. From the US Tea Party enthusiasts to the Spanish 15-M grouping, a vigorous sequence of movements does appear to be rising from the ashes of a more religious attachment.

Is politics in the process of being hijacked, then, by those who cleverly perceive the inability of modern religion to be that opiate of the people any longer? As a kind of interface between on the one hand the consumerism that distracts us from the realities of life and on the other those selfsame realities, perhaps politics is becoming a substitute for believing in higher things.

Maybe politics has become a prosaic representation of what God used to be: something we can curse in bad times, pray to in good, genuflect in front of when we find ourselves suppliers of this minister or that … that is to say, where all thinking peoples used to blame the incompetence of belief systems various, we now have the option to interpret all our ills in the light of political practice almost everywhere.

Has politics replaced religion as the cause of our ills – or does it simply serve, as a lightning-rod might, to conduct our ever-growing – often directionless – ire?

And if politics is indeed the cause and not simply the symptom, how can we ensure that society manages to organise itself more efficiently?

Do we need to flatten the towering hierarchies that impose themselves on our organisational structures? Do we need to share responsibilities intelligently in order that decisions are made more collaboratively?

Or do we simply have to allow our economies and body politics to lurch from clever top-heavy individuals to clever top-heavy individuals – in a sense, accepting that God as our hierarchical model is the only workable alternative?

“Austerity” is a euphemism; a “collateral damage” for our times

a con, atomised society, economic blackmail, economic chemotherapy, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, people, perishable goods, politicians, politics, professional politicos No Responses »

May 072012

I just tweeted the following thought:

“Austerity” is a neat euphemism – just like “collateral damage”: those who use it refuse to take ownership for the pain they cause.

A definition of “collateral damage” then? This is what Wikipedia currently says on the matter:

Collateral damage occurs when something incidental to the intended target is damaged during an attack. When used in conjunction with military operations it can refer to the incidental destruction of civilian property and non-combatant casualties.^[1]^[2]

Whilst some time back we might have thought the intended target of austerity strategies everywhere was supposedly lazy and complacent economic processes – foolish lending by lenders on the one hand, excessive borrowing by borrowers on the other – it would now appear that the real object of austerity measures has become the people themselves. Essentially because those in power now care to shift the blame for their manifest stupidities onto those who occupy the lower levels of societal hierarchy:

Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, said that banks were not solely responsible for the financial crisis as “they had to lend to someone”.

The minister, who played a key role in drawing up David Cameron’s economic strategy in opposition, also claimed that people who took out loans were “consenting adults” who, in some cases, were now be seeking to blame others for their actions.

And this:

“Households were spending more than they earned. That’s why household debt rose.”

It’s clear, then, that up there in the stratosphere of decision-makers, there must be a more widely shared perception that voters and their families and friends – not systemic failure of complex financial instruments – are now in the cross-hairs of those who make policy.

Mr Hammond is hardly going to have invented the idea in a vacuum, after all.

It is my thesis, therefore, that austerity measures as engineered and devised of late do not aim to sort out a dysfunctional economy first and foremost – only collaterally damaging and hurting the people who depend on its workings. No. In reality, these people in charge are looking precisely to damage and hurt the people first and foremost, for it is they who are to blame for not having operated as economies most need.

Whilst before we wondered if the people had become a necessary, even if sad, collateral damage to an attempt to rescue an economy, it seems clear to me now – and perhaps to you too – that the economy has become a necessary, even if sad, collateral damage to a pontificating and patronising attempt from top-flight politicos to allegedly rescue the people from themselves.

We the people are being punished because we do not act as these politicos and economists various believe economies need us to act: sensibly, rationally, intelligently and measuredly.

Because we cannot manage that, they – even they – are prepared to sacrifice their own love of that beast which is the economy (their whole reason for being, acting and researching) on the altar of societal suicide.

Rather than contemplate making economic theory in the image of the people’s needs, they prefer to prejudice the perishable goods that are people’s finite lives.

In this, both politicians and economists are the trench-warfare generals of our time.

Where, if not at the beginning of the 20th century, are we to find such an example of stubborn idiocy and casual cruelty as we now bear witness to in economic theory and practice – and throughout the world that serves to destroy us?

People in charge who refuse to take ownership for the pain and destruction they administer.

A passive-aggressive state if there ever was one.

Sustainable politics, anyone?

Ed Miliband, party politics, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics, professional politicos, Psycho, pyramid politics, sorted No Responses »

May 052012

One of our biggest battles, as we try and think our way out of the mess that New Labour left behind it, is understand and accept exactly that it was pyramid politics itself which became the cause of our problems rather than their solution.

As Adam Bienkov, writing for New Statesman, says of Ken Livingstone today (the bold is mine):

The problem was not Ken’s agenda, but the fact that it was Ken calling for that agenda. The sad truth is that after 41 years in London politics, too many Londoners have simply stopped listening to him. Every politician has a shelf life, a point where voters look at them and coldly decide to give another product a go. For Ken that happened in 2008 and he has spent the past four years failing to come to terms with it.

Now, whilst I’m inclined to agree Bienkov is right in what he says, I’m also inclined to believe he doesn’t have to be right in what he says.

Let me explain.

In the light of the economic crises which have destroyed the standards of living of the vast majority of citizens, we thrash and flail around as we attempt to invent and fashion the idea of a sustainable economics: the sort of thing which doesn’t Big Bang its way onto our horizons, only to contract when we least expect it just as suddenly from our grasps. No. Something less dramatic seems to be the tenor of our latterday discourses: something which grows sensibly, sustainably, in accordance with and respectful of the environments we are obliged to operate inside.

A sustainable economics, then, where top people aren’t so top and bottom people aren’t so bottom; where creativity and leadership are allowed to flower at every level; where, indeed, the levels flatten and become as close to a single hierarchy as is practically and sensibly possible.

In times of crisis, we look for such solutions. Only in times of relative success do we ignore the consistent need for sustainability.

So if we translate this desire to political science, could we contemplate the possibility of a sustainable politics?

Not one based on that Darwinian slant of dog eat dog in unending conflict. Rather, where modern commercial virtues such as collaboration and teamwork came to the fore of all political activity.

A while ago, I suggested Ed Miliband might be looking for this – even as he tried to negotiate our way out of the bind New Labour had dropped us in; and even as most of us managed to misunderstand those instincts.

In reality, I think, if I interpret them rightly, his instincts are pretty true for a 21st century context. Both big business and current political practice are still unhappily engineered – at least in part – on the basis of an age-old history of kings, queens, serfs and servants.

What we need now, on the other quite different hand, is a new and sustainable politicking based on the far more democratic ideals of a republic of the voters.

If the middle is mediocre, why does politics strive so hard to encompass it?

creativity, in a hole, managerialism, meritocracy, on a high, political dissonance, politics, Third Way No Responses »

Apr 272012

Rick asks the following question:

Can we all be creative given the right circumstances or is creativity the preserve of a few naturally talented people? It’s an important question for organisations. If it’s the former, you foster an environment where people are given as much freedom and stimulus as possible. If it’s the latter, you recruit highly creative people and keep everyone else in their boxes.

Later on in his post – worth reading in its entirety – we get an explanation of why the latter should be the case. He quotes from Philip Delves Broughton thus:

Most of us, he says, are average. The job of managers is, therefore, to manage the mediocre middle, get as much out of them as they can and stop them from trying to be too creative.

Broughton goes even further, observing that in at least one technology company certain strategies are used to “keep the middle focused and spare senior managers having to fend off endless half-baked ideas and requests”.

My experience as a lowly worker in a banking corporation, where – over several separate periods of senior management turf wars and empire-building – IT systems were chosen by such managers without reference to the people who did the work, is that part of the problem we have in such hierarchical organisations is precisely the inability of these executives to listen properly to what the middle (or, indeed, the bottom) has to think and say on virtually any matter. They are so involved in the outward signs of decision-making process – the meetings, the conference calls, the physicalities of communication – that they very rarely actually pay any attention to warning signs on the ground as a project proceeds.

Their helicopter views flatten all the ridges and mountains and make obstacles disappear unquestioningly.

Only when a new process needs to be implemented, and the systems fail to do what the salespeople promised they would, do these senior managers then put it all in the hands of their hapless workforces, used by now to simply having to get on with the job of employing their base and unrecognised creativity to create the relevant workarounds which will serve to sort out the mess the allegedly imaginative types always seem to manage to leave behind them.

If truth be told, there are two types of imagination in a company: one we may perhaps inadvisably term male, the other we may perhaps inadvisably term female. I divide it so, even though I risk causing offence, because I saw it split thus in my aforementioned former place of work. The driven and single-minded souls, the supposedly “creative” types at the top of the tree, mainly red-blooded alphas it would seem (and therefore males), all seemed to try and fashion future perfections that would solve the company’s problems at one fell stroke. Meanwhile, when the catastrophes that resulted threatened to destroy the ability of the organisation to do the job it was supposed to do, it became the turn of the mostly female workforce at the lower levels of responsibility to use their well-honed abilities to think everyone out of the bag senior managers had got into the habit of dropping the company in.

Because this female creativity I describe (some men exhibit it also, by the way – though rarely as uncomplainingly as their female colleagues might) is so very very clever and good at what it can achieve, there is, as a result, absolutely no incentive nor need for the male creativity to act any more efficiently or realistically than it already does.

Thus we witness the kind of situation where people at different levels in such large organisations find it difficult to learn from another; are unable to respect the wisdoms of another; and come to the conclusion that the mediocre middle (or, indeed, bottom) needs to stay in its cowed and evermore data-inputting boxes.

There is one exception to those sectors which refuse to recognise the value of the supposedly mediocre middle, though: the practice of politics. For politics, the middle is neither mediocre nor to be undervalued: the middle, in politics, being the Holy Grail that generally leads to the winning of elections.

So often does politics seem to get 21st century life wrong at the moment. And yet, maybe here we see something different.

Are we actually saying that the instincts of politics are right in all of this? Valuing the middle not as mediocre but something splendidly imaginative. A crossing of frontiers and borders bound to generate the kind of creative dissonances a modern century requires.

Or do Rick’s management experts have the finger on the pulse of what makes a company – and by extension, a society too – as creative as it should be?

Creative enough to devise one best way – but not too creative to question it!

Pardon me my cynicism, will you? I guess I’m already too old to easily believe what I’m told.

So then. To summarise. Marvellous, mediocre – or even anti-creative perhaps? Who’d care to occupy the middle of almost anything?

Except, conceivably, the most creative of all human beings … that highly underestimated worker, and voter, bee.

My money’s on the middle. What about you?

Politicos, Facebook chats, eurocitizens and ACTA

ACTA, Europe, European Parliament, European Union, eurozone, Facebook, in a hole, politicians, politicking, politics No Responses »

Apr 262012

I am mightily confused by what I’ve just ~~seen~~ missed. I installed the European Union’s Facebook chat app as per my previous post, and waited for something to happen. I did this at 13.30 BST, because I’d understood from previous information that the chat was timed for 14.30 CET. Nothing happened at 13.30 BST – so I waited till the following hour came round at 14.30 BST. This time the chat was working (Facebook access required), and as I scrolled down the already 300 comments, most of which obviously hadn’t been answered, I readied my observations and questions to be launched into the maelstrom of what seemed like generally unhappy people.

This is what I would have said, had the chat lasted the scheduled hour and I’d had a chance to make my eurovoice heard:

in the negotiation of ACTA, process has been obscure, flawed and anti-democratic since the start;
discussion is OK, listening is better, consultation is very good – but best of all is involvement from the outset;
the real question for me is not whether we can sort out what was originally an offline problem of counterfeiting and piracy – and which will continue to exist even if the Internet is effectively shut down – but, rather, whether the Internet in the future is to be a public municipal space of the voters or an evermore commercially-oriented private space of public use;

If ACTA and its unhappy sons and daughters are to gain any kind of democratic approval, they need to show they are aware of the implications of all the above and are able to rectify properly the manifest failures committed to date, before – and not after, at some specious “next time round” – the European Parliament consents to passing the treaty.

Which is to say process must be clear; real public involvement must exist from the beginning; and the virtual commons we are proposing must start from the idea of a municipality of empowered and communicating citizens – a public space, that is, instead of a base tool to help a particular kind of capitalism (a model which, incidentally, has demonstrably failed us) gain further footholds in modern commerce.

This, meanwhile, is what Mr Schulz had to say on the subject of that selfsame process and ACTA’s transparency. To this question …

Good afternoon Mr. President. How can I trust politicians when I have to learn about the ACTA agreement thru WIKILEAKS ?

… he answered thus:

[...] Trust me, the whole debate in the EP was completely open during the whole process. And the necessary steps to make it public and transparent was made by the European Parliament. Wiki leaks may also have played a role.

Was the debate really as open as it should’ve been? Really?

Are we really trying to say this wasn’t set up as a rubber-stamping operation, where individual sovereign parliaments were picked off one by one in order to create an overwhelming momentum? A momentum, what’s more, which was finally, and perhaps surprisingly, stopped in its tracks by over two million citizens’ signatures conveying a massive message of democratic resistance to secret treaty-making anywhere and everywhere.

This, after all, is ultimately all about people’s access to 21st century utilities – the basic tools we need to live in modern life.

My last observation then? Follow Bill Gates’s advice: sort out the real world first before you multiply it up into the virtual.

ACTA doesn’t do that at all.

Democracy requires that it must.

And we, as voters and participants in that democracy, need people like Mr Schulz to say far more interesting things about the importance of democratic engagement and the virtual commons than he has managed to let out of the bag today.

Politicians with backbone or voters with powers?

Labour Uncut, lobbyists, on a high, open government, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics No Responses »

Apr 202012

Kevin suggests that what the lobbying scandals need are an improved political class. He writes interestingly when he says:

The correct place to start is to recognise that most MPs – in all parties – are pretty straight. Let’s encourage them to know their own minds a bit more. And let’s provide them with proper independent policy support to help them formulate their own positions on the key issues.

One observation before we continue: whilst I agree that most MPs are likely to be straight, I am inclined also to believe that the higher up the greasy pole they get, the less straight they become. This is a serious issue, of course, because the higher up they are, the more disproportionate their influences.

Anyhow. Kevin continues to write interestingly when he concludes the following (the bold is mine):

The conspiracy theorists and gesture politics mob who want to choke-off lobbying will simply fail to do so if ministers come forward with weak measures, or we will see our democracy asphyxiated if they come forward with clumsy, catch-all ones.

But let’s use this moment to change politics as much as lobbying. Unless we beef-up our MPs’ ability to shape the policy agenda, rather be shaped by lobbyists of whatever hue, we will have missed a trick.

And the bottom feeders of the lobbying world will get away scot-free when this latest, predictable and toothless attempt to clean-up the industry fails to do just that.

I said much the same thing when I suggested the following recently, with respect to the related subject of party political funding and PR. Which is precisely why I argued in favour of a system whereby customers of companies could decide whether to make a purchase on the basis of a traffic-light labelling system which explained how much an organisation was spending on funding and PR per political party. In fact, I expanded on the theme in another post the other day on the subject of a US site called sopatrack.com. Here, tools which scrape publicly available data help determine which US congressmen and women vote “with the money” – money the wider constituents of the American Congress may raise for their own, often grubby, purposes.

The virtues of the above two ideas? Both of them give back to the voters the knowledge that translates into power – without requiring the current political class to change, a priori, its behaviours. The only legislation we would actually need would be freedom of information powers to access the necessary datasets where access did not currently exist. Not a small order, I do have to accept – but far easier an order to define and delimit than the diffuse desire to do something about political corruption.

So whilst Kevin is right – we do need a political class with more backbone (which, as he rightly points out, does imply independent means to study matters of modern import accurately and objectively) – the constituency he misses out of the equation, the voters themselves, also needs a greater capacity to oversee what’s going on.

And the tools I mention above, providing not a political straitjacket but rather constructive carrots and sticks, could achieve just that.

The greatest unprofession of all

Coalition, laws, lawyers, politicians, politicking, politics, unclassifiable, undemocracy, uneconomics, unprofessions No Responses »

Apr 182012

This story today makes me wonder what sort of government – and perhaps by extension, what sort of law – we want:

A Libyan military commander is taking legal action against Jack Straw, to find out if the ex-foreign secretary signed papers allowing his rendition.

Abdel Hakim Belhadj claims CIA agents took him from Thailand to Gaddafi-led Libya, via UK-controlled Diego Garcia.

His lawyers have served papers on Mr Straw after the Sunday Times reported claims that he allowed this to happen.

It’s interesting that whilst the users of Twitter and other social networks (my take here) are battling to keep the law out of encroaching on their casually couched freedoms of speech, that selfsame tool for supposedly exacting the truth of a matter is reaching up to the stratospheric levels of ex-government ministers and the like.

And my question really is: do we know what we are doing?

Once the law begins to get involved with the minutiae of relatively trivial intercourse, it can hardly resist the temptation to go after the mightiest in the land. That’s what seems to me to be happening here. A game whereby everything must come under its apparently objectivising gaze. Maybe bearing more than a passing resemblance to that bewildering profession of economics which currently rules so many of our roosts.

Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong: it’s not the purpose of this post to decide. It may be fair to send racist and foul-mouthed social-network users to prison; it may be right to serve civil papers on ex-ministers of previous governments. I do hold my own opinion – but as a simple voter, what does that count? In a society evermore circumscribed by the supposedly “good” and “wise”, what can be the point of me expressing it in relation to concrete cases which clearly have their complex and incommunicable ins and outs?

It does seem to me, however, in a more general sense, that there must be an alternative to an eternal legalisation of society. In a way, it surely parallels the terrible medicalisation of what other ages judged to be the glory of human eccentricity: two professions – the medical and legal both – marching side by side in their awful attempts to type, control and ultimately homogenise our every instinct and movement as multifarious and ever-so-gentle beings.

Is this a battle, then, between the professions on the one hand and a wider and far more educatedly intelligent civic society, now far more aware of its intrinsic and moral rights, on the other?

Is what we are witnessing actually a turf war where economists, lawyers and doctors are all – maybe subconsciously, maybe with massive intention – fighting in some sad way to recover the respect and deference of yore?

And is it time the rest of us understood this war for what it was – and, by so doing, tried to renegotiate and reshape the compact which previously existed and defined our society?

In much the same way as some have argued in favour of an uneconomics, maybe it’s now high time we began to extend the principle to the other professions in the mix: unlaw, unmedicine and – even – uneducation.

Who knows? Perhaps that’s exactly what this Coalition government is really all about.

It’d certainly help to explain very many of the dynamics currently on show.

And, as a result, whilst implementing foolishly and destroying quite unnecessarily, they may have a point in some of what they think. If only our ministers knew how to properly verbalise their instincts, perhaps we could get somewhere through tried and tested methods of debate.

That greatest unprofession of all: the politico with nothing to do but retread old empires and resell them as something new.